Often enough that seeing each other stays ordinary. For your closest few, that's a rhythm measured in weeks — every two or three. For the wider circle you love, every month or two. Past about three months without presence, something honest should be said: this friendship is now running on memory.
There's no law of physics here, and the right cadence bends around babies, distance, and hard seasons. But the principle underneath doesn't change: friendship is maintained in person and merely bookmarked everywhere else. The like, the meme, the "we should catch up!!" are bookmarks. Lovely, and not nothing. But nobody's life was made less lonely by being well-bookmarked.
Why drift never announces itself
Nobody decides to see a friend less. It happens by deferral — each week a reasonable week to not make the plan. The group chat makes it worse by feeling like contact: the thread scrolls daily, so the fact that nobody has been in the same room since spring registers on no one's dashboard. Drift is invisible precisely because the phone is so busy.
The fix is embarrassingly unromantic: cadence. Decide, per person, roughly how often you two make sense in person. Then notice when reality slips behind intention — because noticing is the entire battle. Once you've noticed, the coffee takes one message to arrange.
Make the noticing automatic
You can run this on paper: a list of your people, a "last seen" column, ten minutes on a Sunday. Hosts kept books like this long before software.
Or let the software do the noticing, which is exactly the job Coterie's quiet ping exists for: you set a cadence per person, every coffee and dinner you log updates "last together," and when someone's drifting past their rhythm you get a nudge — and one tap turns the nudge into an invitation. The technology's whole role is to end at a table. It counts the weeks so you can spend the evening.
Downgrade gracefully, don't ghost accidentally
Not every friendship should be biweekly, and pretending otherwise is how calendars collapse. It's kinder, and more honest, to hold a smaller inner circle at a real rhythm than to hold everyone at a fictional one. The seasonal friend seen every solstice with genuine joy is a healthy friendship. The "close" friend unseen for a year is like a eulogy in progress.
The move this week
Pick the one person the last section made you think of. Don't text "we should catch up." Send a date, a time, and a place — the whole invitation, decided. Presence starts as somebody's calendar entry; let it be yours.